Trade-Off Denial

Tears for Fears: Mothers Talk

Those of you smart and kind enough to have read and reviewed Losing My Religions know that one of my main pieces of advice is to always ask, "What is the alternative?"

From Ezra Klein's recent podcast, "The I.R.A. Passed a Year Ago. Here’s a Progress Check," a good companion to this:

Ezra:

“The largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585 megawatts. To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400-megawatt solar power facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres of land every week for the next 30 years.”

And that’s just solar. We’re not talking wind there. We’re not talking any of the other stuff we’ve discussed here, transmission lines. Can we do that? Do we have that capacity?

Robinson Meyer:

No, we do not. We absolutely do not.

....

Ezra:

I was reading this piece by Michael Gerrard, who is a professor at Columbia Law School. He’s a founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law there. It’s called “A Time for Triage,” and he has this sort of interesting argument that the environmental movement in general, in his view, is engaged in something he calls trade-off denial.

And his whole point — and it’s a very real point and one reason I think permitting reform is hard and one reason I say I don’t have the solution in my pocket — is that, look, you can always come up with the edge cases that make the environmental movement look really bad or make these laws look really bad. So a famous one is in San Francisco. You ended up having around a decade of fighting and over 1,000 pages of California Environmental Quality Act review to add bike lanes, just like an obviously good thing for the environment. It just takes forever.

But you do have things where you really are pitting interests against each other, including environmental ones. I mean, if we are going to build out two 2,000-acre solar farms a week for 30 years, that is going to take up land that did not have anything on it before. It’s plausible it will go into the habitats of endangered species or threatened species. I mean, you really will have choices to make.